Let me be blunt: therapists are the emotional sanitation workers of late-stage capitalism.

You hold other people’s pain all day while trying to remember your password for the EHR system, drink enough water, and somehow keep your own frontal lobe from melting into compassion fatigue.

The clients cry, the insurance claims glitch, the Zoom lags, and you start asking your cat reflective questions.

But what if you didn’t have to run on cold brew and unresolved idealism?

Here’s a science-backed, sincerity-soaked, slightly reverent supplement stack for therapists who want to feel less like a burnt offering to the trauma gods and more like a grounded, well-resourced human with a working vagus nerve.

This isn’t medical advice. This is nervous system harm reduction. It’s how I get through my days in the clinic and my afternoons and occasional evenings of private practice.

If UMZU is the slightly rebellious honors student of the natural supplement world — smart, independent, wearing a hoodie with Latin phrases on it — then Ancestral Supplements is the primal kid who eats raw liver and refuses to wear shoes, and Thorne is the kid who took AP Bio and interns at a genomics startup.

All three brands traffic in the same basic dream: that with the right nutrients, you can feel more like yourself, only better.

But they have very different strategies for getting there. And for those of us trying to find a supplement routine that doesn't feel like cosplay, this matters.

Here’s a breakdown of how UMZU compares to two of its most philosophically interesting competitors — Ancestral Supplements and Thorne — along with a deeper look at how science, branding, and purpose intersect.

Some supplement companies pitch themselves like snake oil salesmen with better branding.

Others hide behind vague wellness buzzwords and stock photography of people doing yoga in cornfields.

But UMZU? UMZU takes a different tack.

They want you to believe in science — and not just the cold, clinical kind, but the kind that’s been lived, tested, and passionately defended by a man who rewired his own hormones with nothing but broccoli, research papers, and stubbornness.

Founded by Christopher Walker — a neuroscience student who turned a pituitary tumor diagnosis into a lifelong mission — UMZU is a company devoted to natural, evidence-informed supplements designed to optimize hormone health, brain function, and digestive resilience.

Yes, there’s boldness in the branding. But once you dig into the ingredients and research, the surprising thing is… a lot of it holds up.

This is not a parody. This is not a paid endorsement. This is a love letter. I’ve Been trying supplements like UMZU for most of my adult life. I’ve found UMZU to be among the very best.

Money can’t buy happiness.

But it can buy a mattress, an ADHD coach, two therapy apps, a sound machine, and blackout curtains.

And still, you lie awake—remembering that thing you said in 2016. The one that no one else remembers but has somehow become your brain’s favorite midnight feature.

A new study in Emotion (Hudiyana et al., 2024) confirms what most adults sense but can’t articulate without crying: money helps in the long run, but how you feel about money determines how miserable or okay you are right now. It’s the split between income and financial satisfaction, and it maps directly onto how the mind handles time, memory, and meaning.

And no, this isn't just about income brackets and budgeting spreadsheets.

It’s about how your brain metabolizes the future—especially when it’s dark out and quiet and your prefrontal cortex has gone home for the day.

Turns out, nightmares aren’t the cause of your bad sleep—they’re the consequence of it.

That’s the grim little twist served up by a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, which used wearable EEG headbands to track what really happens when the body tries (and fails) to sleep peacefully in the 21st century.

Researchers found that when your night is a series of unfortunate awakenings—tossing, turning, checking the clock at 3:17 a.m. for no reason at all—you’re more likely to be rewarded the next night with a premium-grade nightmare.

And not just a weird dream about your 8th-grade math teacher—no, the real thing: terror, threat, emotional overload, and sometimes enough fear to jolt you awake.

But the nightmare itself? It doesn’t seem to poison the next night’s sleep. At least not directly. Nightmares, it seems, don’t cause insomnia.

Insomnia, on the other hand, might just be the slow-moving train that pulls your psyche into dream-hell the following night. It’s not a loop—it’s a sequence. And your brain is staging the horror film.

Natalie and Shane Plummer, a married couple from Meridian, Idaho, have been together for 24 years. About 12 years ago, they made the decision to sleep in separate bedrooms — initially to improve their quality of sleep.

Natalie wanted relief from Shane’s snoring, and Shane, the tidier of the two, appreciated having his own space.

What they didn’t expect was that this arrangement would also enhance their sex life, increasing both the frequency and quality of their intimacy.

Instead of sharing a bed out of habit, they found that being apart at night made their time together feel more intentional and exciting, or so they claim in the New York Times.

But what really annoys me is that several New York couples therapist proclaimed extreme enthusiasm for this dubious practice, without completely discussing the science.

Shame on them.

When someone has been physically starved, reintroducing nourishment too quickly can be dangerous.

The same is true of emotional refeeding.

If you’ve been in a marriage or partnership marked by long-term low-intimacy functioning, diving straight into vulnerability, therapy marathons, or “spicing things up” can overwhelm the nervous system.

You need slow restoration, not a grand, dramatic reconciliation.

Emotional refeeding is a way of gently rebuilding co-regulation and connection in relationships where both people are carrying the silent inheritance of childhood neglect, attachment injury, or mutual avoidance.

In a world where your dentist has better access to your calendar than your spouse does, a new meme is quietly organizing couples’ lives one Google invite at a time. It’s not sexy. It’s not spontaneous. It’s not tantric.

It’s Tuesday night at 7 p.m. with a bottle of wine, two slightly nervous adults, and a shared agenda titled:

“How Are We Really?”

Welcome to Maintenance Date Culture—a hybrid of check-in conversation and romantic outing, where couples book time not just to connect, but to calibrate.

Think of it as an “emotional oil change,” only with more eye contact and slightly less guilt than couple’s therapy.

What Is a Maintenance Date?

Once upon a time, in a postwar America that reeked of Brylcreem and paternalism, college-educated men married secretaries, nurses, and high school sweethearts who hadn’t finished a bachelor’s degree.

This arrangement suited everyone: He brought home the bacon, and she fried it while raising the kids and trying not to lose her mind.

But then came a revolution in pumps and pantyhose.

Women enrolled in college, graduated in droves, entered the workforce, and—strangely enough—still wanted to get married.

For a few decades, everything looked egalitarian.

Men and women began partnering with their educational equals. Sociologists called this trend educational homogamy, and everyone clapped.

Now the clapping has stopped.

Can your ability to name animals quickly actually predict how long you’ll live?

According to a remarkable new study published in Psychological Science, the answer appears to be yes—at least for older adults.

Researchers diving into the rich archives of the Berlin Aging Study have uncovered a startling and oddly charming truth: out of all the cognitive skills they measured, verbal fluency stood out as the strongest predictor of longevity.

Not memory. Not vocabulary. Not even perceptual speed. Just your capacity to list animals or words beginning with a particular letter at a decent clip.

How strong is the effect? Strong enough to predict nearly a nine-year difference in median survival time.

Once we had Sunday dinners, bedtime stories, and snow days. Then came the pandemic, which turned routines into risk assessments and left rituals abandoned like shopping carts in an empty parking lot. Now, families are trying to remember how to gather again—without flinching.

Welcome to the quiet, sacred work of rebuilding. After years of chaos, families are crawling out of survival mode, blinking in the sunlight, and asking: What do we still believe in?

This post isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about something far more ambitious: spiritual reconstruction through crockpots, game nights, and Saturday pancakes.

What Exactly Is a Family Ritual?

Let’s begin with an ancient truth, forgotten sometime around the invention of Outlook Calendar: Doing nothing is not a problem to solve.

It is not laziness, or failure, or a time-management issue. It is a sacred practice. A minor miracle. A finger in the eye of the productivity-industrial complex.

We used to do nothing all the time. Sit on porches. Watch clouds. Chew. Exist.

Now we “take breaks” by doomscrolling and call it rest. We open meditation apps with streak trackers and try to achieve stillness.

Friends, that is not rest. That is capitalism in a robe.

Let’s do nothing—on purpose—and see what happens.